The Better Half

(4 min read)

It's commonly accepted that a superiority complex is rooted in low self-esteem. We teach our children that when someone picks on them, it is usually because that person feels bad about themselves and thinks that putting someone down will help them feel better. It's less commonly accepted that the opposite can also be true. If you're walking around with an inferiority complex, you think you're better than everyone else.

Looking for every event in your life to prove how terrible you are, is seated in your own need to cling to your uniqueness. If everything you come across means you are inadequate and not worthy of whatever you think you want, the focus is on YOU. If the constant focus is on the self, there is a deeply hidden sense that this self is somehow more important than any other experience. If that self has a notion of its potential to do amazing things, but the experience does not match that construct of arriving at that potential, the subsequent display of self-loathing, self-hatred, and even self-harm can ensue.

When we love ourselves so much and cling to this notion of self so much, witnessing ourselves enduring circumstances of pain and inadequacy is too much to bear. We say things like: "if I'm so good at what I do, how come I'm not on the Forbes 30 under 30?" "How come I'm not happily married with two kids by 35?" "how come I haven't received the recognition I deserve?" "Why haven't I... I should be..." insert your projection of happiness and success here. You may have done this: you see someone in your field has achieved a goal you'd like to achieve. You immediately toil over how someone less talented than you may have reached that level. You then berate yourself endlessly for some deeply ingrained and permanent yet undescribable flaw as the reason you could never have that. You tell yourself, "I'm just not good enough, and I never will be," as a familiar cascade of emotions washes over you.

I've been privy to my hyper-fixation of my inadequacies for quite some time, but my husband's death made me turn a more observant eye on it. Soon after he died, this aspect of my psyche started kicking into high gear. So much so that it surprised me. My husband had just died, yet I was worried about my self-esteem? My husband had just died, and all I could think about was how terrible I was? How I'd never be successful in my career? How I was a terrible mother for letting my sons watch their screens for a few hours so I could binge-watch reruns of The Office? How awful I was for not doing the dishes or not drinking enough water. (Because everyone knows that people worthy of love aren't dehydrated) Surely there were more important and profound feelings to be had after losing the love of my life? Surely my sadness over losing him was more important than my sadness that I hadn't established myself in a more lucrative career?

Upon deeper reflection, I discovered I was using his death as further proof that I was, in fact, inherently (uniquely) flawed and, therefore, shouldn't even try. When Joe was alive, our being together provided me a convenient shield from my obsessive self-doubt. Of course, when memorializing loved ones, we often highlight the best of them, but there is no exaggeration when I say Joe was kind, successful, handsome, and loved by almost everyone who met him. He was the life of the party, generous and deeply wise. Joe was an incredible man, and he loved me. He chose me. If a man like that could love me, then maybe I wasn't as much of a piece of shit as I thought.

But then that man died. That shield dissolved. And I was left with the work of putting together a self-image without him. My better half was gone, so it stands to reason that what was left was the worse half. My obsession with seeing my faults in everything took center stage because I was so involved with the concept of a truly existent "self" and the increasingly intolerable circumstances that "self" found unfolding around her.

Laying in my bed in the middle of the night, silently sobbing to not wake the boys, I realized something. I needed to let go. I needed to let go of the image of myself as it related to Joe. If being with Joe meant something about me, I needed to let go of who I thought that was. I needed to stop clinging to a self-concept because that self no longer exists. In a way, I needed to let go of Joe. So I turned inward to honor the start of this process. One of the things that infuriated me most about my husband was when I was expressing my feelings of low self-esteem, he would always explain the Buddhist concept of non-self. He would go deeply and joyfully into his passionate refrain of releasing ourselves from self-clinging. He would tell me the solution was to do something for someone else and stop thinking about myself. It infuriated me because I wanted him to join me in my self-cherishing. I wanted him to affirm my feeble sense of self. But he wouldn't because he knew the truth.

The house of cards upon which we build our sense of self is so delicate that one breath of truth can send it tumbling down, yet we defend it ferociously. Maintaining a notion of a truly existent self means we work endlessly to collect only the experiences we deem desirable and fight endlessly to repel those experiences we find undesirable. It's no wonder we are tired.